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Comment by _fat_santa | Hacker News Reader

I have to ask a really basic question: Why does Microsoft have such a vested interest in users using Edge over competitors?

I get the argument: "it's their browser, of course they want people to use it" but for me that answer isn't satisfactory. What is the financial motive to go through all the trouble of pushing Edge? The only reason I can think of is "your data" but even then, what sort of data might MS want to extract from your browser that they can't get from the underlying OS?

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Not necessarily an answer, but an overview of the topics in the domain space of your question might include:

- DATA COLLECTION: Allows Microsoft to collect user data for analytics, targeted advertising, and product improvement.

- REVENUE GENERATION: Advertisements and search engine partnerships generate revenue for Microsoft.

- ECOSYSTEM INTEGRATION: Encourages use of other Microsoft products, enhancing user experience.

- VENDOR LOCK-IN: User familiarity discourages switching to competitors, ensuring long-term revenue.

- COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE: Maintaining a popular browser aids in negotiation with third-party service providers.

- SOFTWARE CONTROL: Allows Microsoft to guide software standards, impacting web development.

- USER EXPERIENCE: Direct control over browser enhances customer support and troubleshooting.

Thanks, ChatGPT

Yeah, I've reorganized and edited a bit some ChatGPT answers—it's quick at sketching out the big picture, and it's easy to fact- or logic-check if needed. Also helps me catch stuff I might miss if I'm in a hurry.

> I have to ask a really basic question: Why does Microsoft have such a vested interest in users using Edge over competitors?

FOMO and Paranoia. Anything that looks like a market they might miss out on they get scared, freak out, create a shit product and jump in the market with HUGE marketing/info campaigns to convince everyone theirs is the best product, and then it turns out it's not really a profitable market at all. But at least they weren't usurped.

Have you used Microsoft Edge recently? It is a dumping ground for all things that Microsoft wants to try in a way that is easier to do than sending A/B testing out via Windows Update.

* Collections

* Shopping

* Browser Essentials

* Website scanning

* Outlook integration

* Games integration

* ...

They have a OneNote feed sidebar now, too. Actually great for quick notes during browsing. Except that it's part of Edge, which is a privacy disaster full of dark patterns.

Advertising is really lucrative. MS wants to get a bigger share of the pie, and that's done by driving people to use Bing. Also, if Bing Chat gets people used to using AI chatbots for search, that dramatically increases the cost of delivering search. Search results are not a huge chunk of Microsoft's revenue, but they are Google's main source of income. Search standardizing on LLM chatbots would take a huge chunk out of Google's margins.

Default Bing and Microsoft integration. So ad revenue.

Just see chrome current intention now? What purpose they promote chrome crazily in the early days. It's to monopolize and becoming the dominant player which control how the policy of interneting favor to their ads activity

Your web browsing habits reveal a lot more about you than your desktop habits.

Really hard to hide your web browsing habits from the OS itself. They could trivially grab most of the data, if they wanted.

And lose either 4% of their global revenue or the european market

A generous interpretation is that they don't want to worry about the resources used by internal OS components being compatible across infinite variety of browser vendors, versions, add-ons (and those versions), etc.

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